THE ENGLISH WITNESS

by John C. Bailey

  I knew the only way anti-clockwise round the site was via an impassable precipice. The clockwise route provided scant cover, but there was no point in putting off the inevitable. Taking great care to keep my finger outside the trigger guard, as I was afraid to apply the safety catch in case I fumbled it in a moment of need, I began to creep along the back of the wall in the direction of the tower. I remembered that there was a row of cloisters in which I had found the two monks whom Adolfo had shot, and thought the stone arches might provide me with a covered position from which I could return fire. I just had no idea how to get across the open space without making myself an easy target.

  Over the next few minutes I picked and scrambled my way round the perimeter of the monastery grounds. I dived across the more exposed patches, crawling where necessary underneath the taller stands of vegetation, nervous all the time in case a sudden change in the breeze blew the fire in my direction. At every second I expected to feel the impact of a bullet. Eventually I drew level with the tower, and once again surveyed the plaza. I’d fantasised as I scrambled round from my earlier position that I might get round behind the shooter, but there was no sign of Adolfo anywhere.

  Then for a moment I looked up at the tower, and the light from the fire was still bright enough that I could see a dark oblong patch near the top where one of the vertical louvres had been taken out. In an instant, I knew where Adolfo had set up his sniping position, and with an ecstatic gasp of relief I saw that he had made a tactical mistake; if I kept close to the base of the tower, he would never be able to angle his fire low enough to hit me.

  Scrambling out of cover, I sprinted across to the arched cloisters and flattened myself against the rear wall. It was not as dark there as I would have liked, but the row of pillars gave me some protection. I paused in the shadow of one of them to give my eyes time to adjust to the lower light. Then, a few feet further along, I noticed as if for the first time the two monks I had seen before lying still on the cold stone. There was no more bleeding now from the second man, the one who had informed me of the Señor Leizaola’s presence, and I guessed that he was now resting in peace. I was just stepping over to see if he was still alive when I caught a faint odour of raw sewage. Then Adolfo stepped out in front of me from behind another pillar, a wicked looking combat rifle held under his arm and pointing at my chest.

  “Good evening, James,” he said, the grin on his lacerated, blood-streaked face looking demonic in the flickering light of the fire. “You know, you really are a most annoying child.”

  Once again, I tried reasoning: “I’m sorry if I’ve annoyed you, and you can’t understand how much pain and worry you’ve caused me. But I know why you’re here now. Is there anything I can say to persuade you to let the President live? He’s a good man. He doesn’t deserve to die. And what about all the others who’ll be killed in the violence his death will spark off?”

  Adolfo actually laughed aloud. “If it’s any consolation, I also think he’s a good man. But he’s also a dangerous one. And he deserves to die because he makes the separatist cause look wholesome to moderate people. He’s a far bigger threat to Greater Spain than ETA and all their bombs. If he and the Catalans and the Andalusians and the wretched Navarrese all get their way, we’ll end up as a mass of tiny, impotent statelets in place of the strong, noble nation we should be. Even Portugal ought to be part of it; can you imagine that? Our manifest destiny: one nation from sea to shining sea. And we can get rid of the Jews and the Gypsies and the Homosexuals and the Freemasons—even perhaps the Moriscos one day. Did you know, James, that over ten per cent of Spanish people have Moorish blood?” He spat before resuming his tirade. “Franco himself is a Galician, of course, but he’s put pathetic regional sentiment behind him. He’s made big mistakes, but he’ll be dead in five or six years even if somebody doesn’t put a bullet in him before that. And unless the army takes firm control now, every tin-pot alcalde on the Peninsula will be drafting a declaration of independence.”

  “You’re a Basque yourself, I’ve been told.”

  “Correction. I was a Basque. I was a Catholic. I was an innocent boy before the priests took that away from me. I was a normal…” He paused for a moment, then his face hardened. “Shut up and give me my gun back. Now. Before I shoot you through the gut.”

  I flinched as he lowered the barrel to point at my abdomen. The rifle in his hands was rock-steady, and the hand in which I held his pistol was hanging limply by my side. But I’d seen a movement behind him: the second monk was sitting up, any sound from his movements masked by the continuing crackle of the fire. He raised his hands, first miming the pulling of a trigger and then stretching them out towards me.

  It was hard to avoid looking directly at the monk, so I looked down at the gun in my hand and slowly took it by the barrel as if to hand it to the man standing in front of me. I saw Adolfo relax slightly and take his left hand away from the fore-end of the rifle stock to reach out for the pistol. At that point I looked him straight in the eyes and he looked back into mine. “So,” I asked him, “when was the last time you got a hard-on, you pathetic fucking eunuch?”

  There was a visible moment of blankness in which his brain tried to reconstruct what I’d just said in a way that took the sting out of the words. Then his face set hard and his eyes committed murder, but before he had time to raise the stock of the rifle to his shoulder – because only movie actors fire a high-powered rifle from any other position – I passed the pistol in a flat underarm throw to the injured monk. He caught it deftly. It took him a couple of seconds to check that the safety was off, get his finger onto the trigger and aim, and I thought for a moment that I’d timed it wrongly.

  But Adolfo had problems of his own. Caught between fury, hurt and self-preservation, determined to kill me and realising too late that the real threat was behind him where he had believed there were only corpses, he hesitated too long. In almost any combat situation a rifle is more use than a pistol. In almost any situation. But when you have to turn quickly, the tip of a rifle barrel has a bigger arc to travel than a handgun, and the whole body is involved in the manoeuvre.

  Adolfo was fast, but he was still spinning round from the waist when a bullet from his own pistol hit him in the small of the back. He managed to get a shot off, but it ricocheted harmlessly off the stonework and buzzed out into the night. Then his legs abruptly folded under him and he slumped to the ground. Even screaming and with his legs jiggling uncontrollably he tried to hang onto the rifle and bring it to bear, but he couldn’t get enough purchase.

  I grasped the barrel of the rifle, pushed it away from me, and kicked him hard in the bicep to make him let go. Then I sat down on the stone floor next to the monk who’d saved my life. I kept the rifle pointed in Adolfo’s direction, but his legs were now still and he just lay there groaning. The hardest thing I had to cope with while I waited for help to arrive was his stench.

  I never met President Leizaola. The monks had packed in around him so as to form a human shield in a distant room of the monastery. Within minutes of learning that the immediate danger had passed, they had him in a car and on his way back to the boat that had smuggled him in from France. He would return, still secretively but on the historical record, the following year. Five years later he would be free to live in his home country after more than 40 years in exile.

  Adolfo looked as if he were dying already, and he pleaded repeatedly for the coup de grâce while the monk and I waited for help to arrive. If there had been a safe way to do so, I’d have given him back his gun with the single remaining bullet. But once help arrived in the form of Seve, Miguelito and a squad of men in military fatigues, he was taken away in a military ambulance.

  I stayed for nearly a week at the monastery, most of it confined to the infirmary, during which I spent hours giving statements to people none of whom showed me any sort of identification. I was still there when I heard the story of Adolfo’s final hours.

  For two agonising days he was kept al
ive while some kind of hearing took place to decide his future. But in the end, the matter was taken out of his captors’ hands. Late one evening, just as it was getting dark, an elderly Land Rover pulled into the drive of the private clinic in which he was being held. Five armed, masked men marched uninvited onto the premises. No one tried to stop them, and some of the medical staff were ordered to witness events.

  According to these witnesses, the men stood either side of the patient and read out a lengthy sentence in Euskara. Finally, despite his surprisingly determined efforts to fight them off, they flipped him over onto his face. Four of the men then held him still, while the fifth slipped a wire round his neck and garrotted him in the traditional Spanish method of execution.

  Three months later, Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco was killed with a car-bomb planted by four members of ETA. He had been Franco’s most trusted lieutenant and the man most likely to take over on his death. The assassination and the ensuing government reprisals marked a dramatic escalation in hostilities.

  As for me, I still have dreams: good ones as well as bad.

  PART 3

  CHAPTER 17

  JACK

  “So, gentlemen,” said Jack after a long but comfortable silence, “the story’s over. You’ve been a patient and considerate audience, latterly at least. Thanks to our time together I’ve laid some ghosts to rest, and it probably sounds a cliché but I think I’ve gained a better understanding of myself. And now I’m at your disposal. Ask your questions. Take me where you want to go. If I can help you join up the dots in any way, I will. Any ideas?”

  “Thank you, Jack,” murmured Julio. “Thank you for your willingness to help, and for the care you’ve taken to give us a full account of some horrific experiences. I think I know what the chief will want to do now, and with his permission I’ll set the ball rolling.” He looked sidelong at Miguel, and received the nod he had been expecting. “As you promised, the story was useful in giving a context to the bare facts you outlined a few days ago. Now we need to zoom in on one or two specific parts of the story, and analyse them from the viewpoint of the investigation. Does that make sense?”

  Jack nodded. He knew the direction in which the investigation needed to go, and he sincerely hoped the detective would get there without too many leading answers. He could have told the police days ago whom to arrest, but still feared that his secret knowledge could carry a death sentence. They had to identify the suspect themselves, to own the process by which this particular name had come into the frame. “I was expecting that,” he replied. “So what are the important facets that you want to focus on?”

  “That’s down to the chief. But I think one question eclipses all the others, and that’s to do with Adolfo’s fate. He was shot in the back, you said, and you saw it happen. I wish you hadn’t had to see that, but there’s no doubt in your mind, correct?”

  “Absolutely,” replied Jack, trying hard to hide his satisfaction. “He was paralysed from the waist down, soiling himself and screaming to be put out of his misery.”

  “Then you saw him taken away, yes?”

  “Yes. There was a lot going on, but several ambulances turned up as well as a couple of unmarked cars packed with men in uniform. Some of them put Adolfo on a stretcher and into an ambulance.”

  “And you never saw him again?”

  “No, thank God.”

  “So the last you saw of him, he was alive.”

  “Absolutely. Dying, I was certain of that, but not dead.”

  “OK, think carefully. I know you’ve already told us, but let’s go over it again. How did he die, and how did you learn about it?”

  “I was told that he was stable in a clinic. Then out of nowhere a bunch of paramilitary types appeared, held up the clinic and garrotted him.”

  “And did they leave his body or take it with them?”

  “I’ve always pictured the body just lying there surrounded by horrified faces as they drove away, but I don’t think I was ever told one way or the other.”

  “Who was it who told you all this? And based on what evidence?”

  “I simply can’t remember. I was questioned by one man after another: monks, police, army, security… the distinctions seemed hazy even then. And I don’t think any of them were the official Spanish authorities. It could have been any one of them that told me the story. And as for the evidence, I suppose the only evidence was the testimony of the medical staff. But I never had any reason to doubt what I was being told. Anyway, why are you niggling away at this? You can’t have any reason to think…”

  “Are you going to tell him now, Chief?”

  “Tell me what?” Jack glanced from one to the other in eager anticipation, straining to keep what he hoped was a look of mystification on his face.

  Miguel looked embarrassed. “I was hoping to spare you the unpleasant details of your friend’s death. But I have to tell you, the first time I saw a connection between your story and our investigation was when you described the death of your young friend in Valencia.” He waited then, allowing the time he assumed Jack would need for the implications to sink in. At first there was no reaction, so he forced the matter along.

  “Of course, Jack,” the detective continued, “I didn’t completely trust you or your story until the criminal police in Valencia confirmed the details of the crime scene: the multiple lacerations from something resembling a surgical scalpel, the sadistic mutilation. Unconsciousness and death would have come about eventually through shock and blood loss, but until then the victim would have been agonisingly aware of what was going on.” There was still no response from Jack. “I regret to inform you that Antonio died in an almost identical way. To the extent that we have to suspect the same killer.”

  Jack had turned white, and he remained silent for a long time, his lips pressed tightly together and his eyes gazing into the distance. The others assumed that he was in shock at Miguel’s revelation, but they were wrong. Jack was actually in a state of cold fury tinged with panic. Suddenly the line of questioning had seemed so promising was not going the way he had wanted and expected. The detective clearly knew or suspected more than he had ever let on. Whether the intention was to frame Jack with the killings or simply to coerce him into further revelations was not yet clear. But far from pursuing the truth, the detective seemed to be setting a trap for him.

  And Miguel had not finished. “The point is,” he continued, “if Adolfo is dead, then he cannot have been your friend’s killer. We have to look for another link between the victims, namely Antonio and your young friend in Valencia all those years ago: no doubt someone who had prior dealings with both of them; someone they both trusted; someone who made contact with each of them, forty years apart, and who had the opportunity to be alone with them.”

  Miguel waited for the implications to sink in before speaking again. “Jack, I think you know where this is going. Can you account for your movements between leaving the United Kingdom and arriving at the station in San Sebastián where we picked you up?”

  Julio, watching the two of them impassively, knew it was a bluff. At this point, the Englishman was supposed to pour out whatever it was that he was so clearly holding back.

  In the event it did not work like that; Jack was too controlled, too sure of the facts to cave in. But he knew that he had been outmanoeuvred. He spoke slowly and clearly: “Apart from your bullying, Miguel, I think there were two factors in the funny turn I had back in the safe house. Firstly, I caught a fleeting glimpse of something I’d managed to keep hidden from myself for decades: Trini the way she was when I found her. Secondly, I had the less horrific but equally shocking realisation that Adolfo is alive. And the worst thing is, he’s untouchable.”

  “What on earth do you mean?” asked Miguel with mock indignation, still pushing Jack for more. “The Spanish police of today aren’t perfect, but we’ve left the Franco era behind.”

  “I have a name for you. You won’t like it. In fact, as of now, we’re all outlaw
s. Dead men walking, in fact.”

  “There’s no need to be patronising, Jack. Nobody is above the law in modern Spain.”

  “Not even José María Gallego? The Minister of Justice himself?” Jack looked at each of them in turn. Julio managed to maintain steady eye-contact; Miguel almost did, but just for a split second the mask slipped. Jack’s eyes widened. “You knew. Or you’ve suspected all this time.” He rose to his feet. “All this long charade: asking for my help, flying me around the country, putting me through the emotional grinder. Why the hell didn’t you just ask if I recognised him when his face came on the news?”

  From some inner recess, Miguel mustered up the decency to look embarrassed. “Jack, I hope you’ll come to accept that we had a good reason, even if you don’t follow our logic. Believe me, it’s been hard stringing you along. Not as hard as it must have been for you. But because of who he is, we had to be absolutely sure. And here’s what it’s all about: believe it or not, we don’t have purges and secret tribunals any more. We have to have credible witnesses who’ll testify in court. And we need physical evidence linking him to crimes of violence. So the first thing is, will you testify?”

  “Yes, I will testify, if I survive long enough. I don’t have to think twice about that. But you could have got me killed on three or four separate occasions. Your organisation must be riddled with his informers. Have you got a hope of bringing him to trial? Heaven knows, he was well protected forty years ago as a middle-ranking policeman. Now he’s a senior figure in government. Are you just going to walk up and arrest him? At a word from him, the entire legal establishment will turn on you.”

  “You’re right, of course. And to make things worse, the current prime minister is weak. He needs Gallego in government to appease the right-wingers. He has no idea how dangerous a monster he’s brought into the fold, and he won’t want to know. We’re going to need clear and incontrovertible evidence even to trigger a resignation, let alone an indictment. That, or a massive public presumption of guilt such as your British newspapers are so skilled at creating. But no newspaper editor has the guts to come out against Gallego.”